Computex 2017 Roundup

Computex is without a doubt the most influential exhibition for the computer hardware industry. Every 1st week of June, who's who of the industry assembles at Taipei - an apt venue, given pretty much every motherboard in every computer ever is made there.

After years of obsessing over mobile, the theme this year is high-performance computing! Of course, mobile will continue to be as important as ever, but it's good to see some focus back on the desktop and workstation computing market.

Be warned - this will be a pretty long post!

AMD

An odd company to start with, indeed, but there's no other company that has been as influential at Computex as AMD.

Threadripper

After years of stagnating, the high-performance desktop is going to receive massive leaps forward. 16 cores, 32 threads, 64 PCIe lanes, quad-channel memory! Though pricing is not announced, all of this is going to come in roughly around the ~$1,000 mark. This is a huge leap forward, folks. Just a month ago, Intel was charging $3,000 for this kind of performance with their Xeon line.

(Source: AnandTech)

Boy, is that Threadripper package massive. Almost looks like a 2.5" SSD!

Ryzen Mobile

Similarly, ultrabooks have been stuck with 2C/4T Intel parts for eons now. No longer, Ryzen Mobile is going to bring 4C/8T to the 15W TDP space! Alongside the 4 Zen cores will be an 11 CU Vega GPU. We don't know the specifications yet, but one thing's for sure, this is going to bring a different class of performance to ultraportable laptops, tablets and 2-in-1s. Let's hope it also brings the price down - Intel has been charging a fair premium for those Core 15W CPUs.

AMD also demoed a prototype ultraportable 2-in-1 running Ryzen Mobile. Looking good!

Source: NGA

Vega

Things aren't so rosy on the Vega front. The Frontier Edition is set to release on 27th June, but the much anticipated RX Vega is now launching only at Siggraph end of July - a full two months away from now. There was a demo running 2x RX Vegas and Threadripper, but it didn't give much away.

I'm afraid it looks like AMD have over-engineered Vega. Those HBM2 memory is surely costing AMD a lot of time and money. NVIDIA's GDDR5X approach was much more sensible in the here and now. Of course, Vega is more future proof, but that isn't worth much to a company as small as AMD. In the end, I'd expect Vega to fall somewhere between GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti.

OEMs get involved

It was interesting to see all 5 major OEMs at AMD's press conference. Each trying to outdo the other with "We love PCs" battlecry. Cheekily, Asus came up stage proclaiming instead, "PC fans love us". It was all good, light-hearted fun - the type you wouldn't imagine seeing at an Intel event.

Also on show was AMD's server processor - the questionably named EPYC. For AMD, this is the most important product, of course, one that'll be charged with bringing in the profit. With Intel's ridiculous Xeon pricing, there's plenty of room for AMD to carve out a successful niche here.

Intel

To be blunt, Intel is in panic mode. It is very, very clear that every announcement made at Computex was a clear response to AMD's moves. Full credit to them for responding this quickly - they could have played the slumbering giant role just as easily. Hey, competition!

Core i9

For years, Intel was happy gouging the high-end desktop market, while offering little to no progress. Threadripper has certainly got their attention, and Intel is responding by moving their Xeon dies to the Core line. Welcome, Core i9, with up to 18 cores!

I've written about Core i9 in detail, do check it out here - https://steemit.com/hardware/@liberosist/the-result-of-competition-intel-core-i9-extreme

8th gen Core

Similarly, ever since the dawn of the ultrabooks, Intel's 15W CPUs have always been dual-core. With AMD announcing 15W 4C/8T Ryzen Mobile, this was no longer tenable.

So, with 8th gen, Intel is offering a quad-core Core i7 for ultraportables. Mind you, we're still stuck at 14nm, though at this point they are calling it 14nm++. Or was it, 14+++? Either way, 10nm will have to wait.

Source: Anandtech

Intel are promising a >30% performance uplift, though you might see >50% in multi-threaded applications. Like I mentioned in the Ryzen Mobile section, this is a massive leap in performance for the ultraportable class laptops, tablets and 2-in-1s.

I doubt Intel will be able to compete with Ryzen Mobile's Vega GPU though! Game well and truly on. Even during AMD's heyday around Athlon 64, they never quite cracked the mobile market. This is their best opportunity yet.

Asus

Asus had a slew of laptops on show. Starting with the ZenBook Flip S and ZenBook Deluxe. Both are based on the same platform, the ZenBook Flip S is a convertible taking on the likes of Lenovo Yoga and HP Spectre X360. The ZenBook Deluxe is more of a traditional ultraportable, and looks like worthy competition to Surface Laptop, HP Spectre 13 and MacBook.

The final addition to the ZenBook line up is the ZenBook Pro. At 1.7 Kg and 19mm, it is plenty portable, but packs some real horsepower. The design is pretty boring though, looks like a MacBook Pro with doses of blue. I'd still favour the XPS 15 in this segment, but pricing will be a key factor here. Starting at $1,299, doubtless the 4K variant will cost a lot more.

ROG

More exciting the Asus ROG Zephyrus, which somehow squeezes a GTX 1080 into a 18mm thick chassis. This is an insane amount of performance in something this small. Remember, the similar sized ZenBook Pro or XPS 15 has to do with GTX 1050 Ti class GPUs, while the MacBook Pro is even further behind with RX 460. A 1080 is probably 3 times as fast as those GPUs!

The secret lies in what Asus calls "active aerodynamics", where the base of the laptop lifts up when opened. This allows far more area for the blower-type fans to intake and exhaust air. Very innovative - after all, portability matters only when closed. There are other sacrifices - the keyboard and touchpad have been moved affront, so there's no palm rest. The battery is also pretty small - probably won't last more than an hour or two gaming. Both reasonable compromises for people who want an ultraportable desktop replacement.

I'd add that Asus is not the only one with this - it is based on Nvidia's Max-Q initiative. Asus' is the only one shipping soon, though.

Also announced by ROG is the Strix Ryzen laptop. Yes, this is both the first high-end AMD-based laptop in at least a decade, but also the very first 8-core laptop within a reasonable footprint. Enabled by Ryzen 7 1700's 65W TDP, of course. To be clear, this is not Ryzen Mobile - rather the desktop Ryzen 7 shoehorned into a laptop.

Windows

With the Fall Creators Update coming in 3 months, there are two major additions to the Windows ecosystem - VR and ARM.

VR headsets

Little known fact - within Windows 10 lies an OS-within-an-OS - Windows Mixed Reality. This is an OS designed for AR and VR scenarios, and runs the same apps from the Store as Desktop and Mobile. This hasn't seen much use besides exotic products like HoloLens, but this fall VR is finally going mainstream.

All 5 major OEMs - HP, Dell, Acer, Asus and Lenovo - have VR headsets launching in a few months' time. Unlike HTC Vive, they have in-built motion tracking as well. At 1440x1440, the pixel density (crucial for VR) seems to be higher than Vive or Rift too. It'll be interesting to see how the 5 options differentiate - though I have to say, the Asus one looks the coolest of the bunch. Not much use when you're using this device to completely take over your vision, though!

Snapdragon 835 PCs

Qualcomm Snapdragon has been a staple of the smartphone world. A vast majority of smartphones run Snapdragon SoCs, and pretty much every high-end smartphone runs the Snapdragon 835. Soon, Snapdragon 835 is coming to Windows 10 PCs. These could be smartphone-like devices, laptops, tablets and 2-in-1s.

The killer feature here is complete emulation for x86 apps. So you can fire up Photoshop or some obscure x86 app on a Snapdragon 835 based Windows 10 PC just fine. Questions remain about the performance, of course, though in the demos things seem pretty smooth and fast.

Snapdragon 835 brings several advantages compared to traditional Intel based PCs. Integrated eSIM for LTE connectivity, smaller footprint for thinner/lighter devices, and greater battery life. The trade-off almost certainly would be performance, but we may be hitting "good enough" thresholds here for regular casual use.

A whole lot more

Those are some of the key announcements, but there's a lot more happening at Computex 2017. Dell has some great Ryzen powered AIOs, and Samsung's Notebook 9 Pro looks great. Acer's Nitro 9 and Gigabyte's Aorus X5 are seriously powerful gaming laptops. MSI has a plethora of gaming laptops as well. One thing's for sure - there's never been a better time to buy a PC!

Oh, and there were tons of motherboards! X299 Intel, X399 AMD, but also more specialty AM4 motherboards, particularly mini-ITX. Another theme was high-clocked DDR4 RAM, heading well into 4000 MHz. But hey, this post is already far too geeky, so I'll stop at 4000 MHz RAM :)